I'm an international student from Bulgaria and I'm planning to apply to Harvard law school in a couple of years. I'm studying Political Science and Mathematics (double major) but I'm considering the idea of taking some courses offered at the Faculty of Law at my university. My question is whether you think this would be an advantage or disadvantage when I apply for the J.D. at Harvard. Here is the list of the courses I'm planning to take in the next three years:

I think it'll be sort of an advantage when you take some of the classes once in a JD program b/c you'll have a leg up on certain concepts. I don't see it as advantage or disadvantage when applying considering a lot of people with law majors, who can practice, from abroad end up getting JDs in the US so they can practice here.

The school won't care in the slightest one way or the other. The most popular major for law school here in the states is political science, and I'd wager that the large majority of those students take some basic constitutional law class(es). Sorry to disappoint you, but none of these courses will actually distinguish you -all HLS will care about is your GPA and LSAT. But by all means, definitely take the courses if you're actually interested in the subjects. Many of them will be quite interesting.

ran12 wrote:I think it'll be sort of an advantage when you take some of the classes once in a JD program b/c you'll have a leg up on certain concepts. I don't see it as advantage or disadvantage when applying considering a lot of people with law majors, who can practice, from abroad end up getting JDs in the US so they can practice here.

FlightoftheEarls wrote:The school won't care in the slightest one way or the other. The most popular major for law school here in the states is political science, and I'd wager that the large majority of those students take some basic constitutional law class(es). Sorry to disappoint you, but none of these courses will actually distinguish you -all HLS will care about is your GPA and LSAT. But by all means, definitely take the courses if you're actually interested in the subjects. Many of them will be quite interesting.

Both of these are true.

It absolutely won't matter to admissions what specific classes you take. All that they care about is that you do well in your classes and have a strong application, including a very high LSAT score. But it could be worth it anyway just because it would make it possible for you to do better once you're in, if the principles of law that you learn are useful to you. It could give you a bit of a head start on other 1Ls.

However, it simply will not help you with admissions. It won't hurt, either, it just won't really make much of a difference at all.

I don't actually see it as an advantage during the application process. What I was worrying about was whether they wouldn't say something like "you've taken all important courses, why don't you obtain a law degree in Bulgaria and then apply for a LLM program in the US".